A Stylised Tree…

Hello 2017! Here are some WIP renders of a little look development scene I’ve been working on, again playing with the idea of stylised photogrammetry. I wanted a general use shader that could be applied to arbitrary objects and shade nicely, with soft internal tones and hard external outlines. The tree model itself was generated from photos taken with my phone, decimated and then brought into 3DSMax. I wanted to play an effect to mimic 2D illustration, and was inspired by backgrounds from Disney’s Winnie The Pooh (2011). I’ve long been a fan of V-Ray’s SSS material system, it softens shading beautifully when used right but it can be a complex beast to tame. To mitigate this, I scaled the scene geometry to be very small, this helped with some extreme softness from the SSS shader right out of the box when lit by the VRay Sun and Sky. I used the VrayToon environment effect to create rough outlines on the geometry and a hand drawn line/crosshatch texture map which was wrapped around the tree trunk cylindrically in a new UV channel. It’s not where I want it to be yet, but I’ll keep at it, below are some work in progress images.

About me

Hey! I’m a Senior Designer/3D Generalist with an Emmy award-winning technology company, with over 14 years experience in the Irish games industry. I’ve also done some TV work at a twice Oscar nominated animation studio.